New York City InDesign User GroupMeeting Notes Archive
Thursday, March 13, 2003
This was the second meeting this year for the New York City InDesign® user group.
After allowing a half hour for members to greet one another, chapter representative Scott Citron introduced the evening’s first guest, John Thorsen, of TECSoft®. TECSoft® is an AppleScript training and development company working with a variety of large and small companies to help them automate their workflow using AppleScript.
Using a simple catalog example, John lead the group through an impressive 30-minute presentation of how AppleScript teams up with FileMaker Pro (or other popular databases), and a digital asset manager (IView MediaPro in this case), to automate repetitive tasks and accurately pour text and images into your InDesign layout.
The next presentation was by Lawrence Horwitz of Teacup Software Located in New York City. Teacup is a new InDesign plug-in developer on the scene. Its first product, Workspace Manager, is scheduled be officially announced any day now.
Learm more about available InDesign plug-ins on this site.
Designed to answer the call of InDesign users frustrated by the application’s inability to create and save custom workspaces, Workspace Manager allows users to define which palettes are open, and where they appear on the screen.
“Click on a graphic frame, and the workspace for graphic frames appears. Click on a text frame, and the text frame workspace comes up. Every time you modify a workspace, those changes are saved –— automatically! Anyone who has been overwhelmed by all the palettes in InDesign will find this product a godsend. No more scrolling down the Window menu, hunting for the right palette. No more palette clutter. Just a smooth and clean interface that presents the palettes you need, when you need them,” says the Teacup website.
An additional and important note, Workspace Manager also prevents palettes from resetting to their default position when changes are made to the InDesign Plug-ins folder.
Following a brief break for pizza and drinks, Adobe’s Noha Edell cranked up her presentation entitled “Transparency Dos and Don’ts.” Through the use of numerous examples and well-prepared demo files, Noha no tonly explained how transparency works within InDesign, but the steps needed to successfully output files containing transparency.
Just after 9pm, the evening’s raffle began. Among the many prizes taken away that night were Woodwing’s Smart Styles plug-in, InFlow from Em Software, Teacup’s Workspace Manager, an InDesign and Adobe Premiere training DVD from Total Training, a copy of TECSoft's Workflow Automation with AppleScript training CD, a great selection of excellent books from Adobe Press, and one copy each of Adobe Illustrator® 10, Photoshop® Elements, and InDesign 2.0.
Thanks again to all our presenters, to those companies who kindly donated items for our raffle, and to Michael Randazzo of the New School, for once again hosting our meeting. Lastly, thanks to everyone who came that night for their spirited support.
Scott
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